a most fascinating read detailing how Bush beat it to Beijing during the change of players with Nixon resigning and Ford/Rockefeller taking the head slots... Bush was up for the vice president under Ford position but it went to Rockefeller so he was gifted with the role of slipping under the Iron Curtain of Red China where Mao still ruled though on his death throes. Controlled by Kissinger this is a necessary read for all who are interested in how withing 30 years China has gone from lock down to top dog in world politics-

this is a free ebook and is chock full of vital info about all the players now ruining our country and our world as has been their habits of quite some time now.

Whatever benign star it is that tends George Bush's destiny, lights his ambition, it was early on trapped in the flawed orbit of Richard Nixon. Bush's meteoric ascent, in a decade's time, from county GOP chairman to national chairman, including his prestigious ambassadorship to the United Nations, was due largely to the strong tug of Nixonian gravity. Likewise, his blunted hopes and dimmed future, like the Comet Kohoutek, result from the too-close approach to a fatal sun. [fn 1]

Several minutes before Ford appeared for the first time before the television cameras with Nelson Rockefeller, his vice president designate, he had placed a call to Bush to inform him that he had not been chosen, and to reassure him that he would be offered an important post as a consolation. Two days later, Bush met Ford at the White House. Bush claims that Ford told him that he could choose between a future as US envoy to the Court of St. James in London, or presenting his credentials to the Palais de l'Elysee in Paris. Bush would have us believe that he then told Ford that he wanted neither London nor Paris, but Beijing. Bush's accounts then portray Ford, never the quickest, as tamping his pipe, scratching his head, and asking, "Why Beijing?" Here Bush is lying once again. Ford was certainly no genius, but no one was better situated than he to know that it would have been utter folly to propose Bush for an ambassadorship that had to be approved by the Senate.

Why Beijing? The first consideration, and it was an imperative one, was that under no circumstances could Bush face Senate confirmation hearings for any executive branch appointment for at least one to two years. There would have been questions about the Townhouse slush fund, about his intervention on Carmine Bellino, perhaps about Leon and Russell, and about many other acutely embarrassing themes. All of the reasons which had led Ford to exclude Bush as vice president, for which he would have needed the approval of both Houses of Congress, were valid in ruling out any nomination that had to get past the senate. After Watergate, Bush's name was just too smelly to send up to the Hill for any reason, despite all the power of the usual Brown Brother, Harriman/Skull and Bones network mobilization. It would take time to cauterize certain lesions and to cool off certain investigative tracks. Certain scandals had to be fixed. Perhaps in a year or two things might cool down, and the climate of opinion alter. But while the psychology of Watergate dominated the legislative branch, a high-profile job for Bush was out of the question.

As Bush himself slyly notes: "The United States didn't maintain formal diplomatic relations with the People's Republic at the time, so my appointment wouldn't need Senate confirmation." An asterisk sends us to the additional fact that "because I'd been ambassador to the United Nations I carried the title 'ambassador' to China." The person that would have to be convinced, Bush correctly noted, was Henry Kissinger, who monopolized all decisions on his prized China card. [fn 2] But George was right about the confirmation. Official diplomatic relations between the US and mainland China came only with the Carter China card of 1979. In 1974, what Bush was asking for was the US Laison Office (USLO), which did not have the official status of an embassy. The chief of that office was the president's personal representative in China, but it was a post that did not require senate confirmation.

Bush's notorious crony Robert Mosbacher, certainly well versed enough to qualify as a conoisseur of sleaze, was uncharacteristically close to the heart of the matter when he opined that in late August, 1974, Bush "wanted to get as far away from the stench [of Watergate] as possible." [fn 3] Like Don Gregg in 1989, Bush wanted to get out of town and let things blow over for a while. His own story that Beijing would be a "challenge, a journey into the unknown" is pure tripe. More imaginative, but equally mendacious is the late Dean Burch's explanation that Bush had "a Marco Polo complex, thinking he could pentrate the mystery of the place." The truth is that with Washington teeming with Congressional committees, special prosecutors, grand juries, all in a furor of ostracism, Bush wanted to get as far away as he could, and Beijing was ideal.

Other attractions inherent in the Beijing posting are suggested by the fact that Bush's predecessor in Beijing was David K.E. Bruce, who had opened the liason office in March, 1973. Bruce had been the chief of the London bureau of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, which meant that he had been the boss of all European OSS operations, including Allen Dulles in Switzerland and all the rest. The presence in Beijing of Bruce, a true eminence grise of Anglo-American intelligence, points up the importance of the post, especially in the covert and intelligence domain.

Otherwise, as Bush has already mentioned, serving in Beijing meant further close subordination to Henry Kissinger. Kissinger told Bush before he left that policy would be implemented directly by Kissinger himself, in contact with the Chinese liaison in Washington and the Chinese representative at the United Nations. In practice, Bush would be ordered about by such Kissinger clones as Richard Solomon of the NSC, Assistant Secretary of State Philip Habib, and Winston Lord, director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff and the scion of an old Skull and Bones family. But then again, Bush was a leading Kissinger clone in his own right.

Finally, anyone who has observed Bush's stubborn, obsessive, morally insane support for Deng Xiao-ping, Li Peng, and Yang Shankun during the aftermath of the Tien An Men massacre of June, 1989 is driven towards the conclusion that Bush gravitated towards China because of an elective affinity, because of a profound attraction for the methods and outlook of Chinese leaders like Mao Tse-tung, Chou En-lai, and Deng, for whom Bush has manifested a steadfast and unshakeable devotion in the face of heinous crimes and significant political pressure to repudiate them. Bush wanted to go to China because he found Chinese communists genuinely congenial.

When Bush was about to leave for China, his crony Dean Burch (no longer troubled, as we see, by Bush's dermal diarrhea) arranged for a fifteen minute sendoff meeting with Ford, but this was reduced to 10 minutes by NSC director Scowcroft, at that time the most important Kissinger clone of them all. Before he left for Beijing, Bush could not resist making some sententious and self-serving pronouncements to the press about his experience in Watergate. He told David Broder of the Washington Post: "We've done a lot of running just to stay in place, and I was sometimes depressed by the amount of bickering that goes on. But then I look across town at Bob Strauss and his problems, and I feel like this was a 20-month honeymoon." Bob Strauss was at this time Bush's counterpart at the Democratic National Committee. Bush noted that there was "philosophical discontent" among right-wing Republicans about the policies of Nixon and Ford, but opined that these would never lead to a third party on the right. Bush defended "patronage" and said he was "worried about the health of the two-party system" even though he worried that this cause is "really not very popular right now." [fn 4]

Bush's staff in Beijing included deputy chief of mission John Holdridge, Don Anderson, Herbert Horowitz, Bill Thomas, and Bush's "executive assistant," Jennifer Fitzgerald, who has remained very close to Bush, and who has sometimes been rumored to be his mistress. Jennifer Fitzgerald in 1991 was the deputy chief of protocol in the White House; when German Chacellor Kohl visited Bush in the sping of 1991, he was greeted on the White House steps by Jennifer Fitzgerald. Bush's closest contacts among Chinese officialdom included vice minister of foreign affairs Qiao Guanhua and his wife Zhang Hanzhi, also a top official of the foreign ministry. This is the same Qiao who is repeatedly mentioned in Kissinger's memoirs as one of his most important Red Chinese diplomatic interlocutors. This is the "Lord Qiao" enigmatically mentioned by Mao during Kissinger's meeting with Mao and Zhou En-lai on November 12, 1973. Qiao and Zhang later lost power because they sided with the left extremist Gang of Four after the death of Mao in 1976, Bush tells us. But in 1974-75, the power of the proto-Gang of Four faction was at its height, and it was towards this group that Bush quickly gravitated. In moving instinctively towards the hardline Mao faction, Bush was also doubtless aware of of Mao's connections with the Yale in China program around the time of the First World War. The Skull and Bones network could turn up in unexpected places.

Bush and Barbara were careful to create the impression that they were rusticating away in Beijing. Barbara told Don Oberdorfer in early December: "Back in Washington or at the United Nations the telephone was ringing all the time. George would come home and say, excuse me, and pick up the phone. It's very different here. In the first five weeks I think he received two telephone calls, except for the ones from me. I try to call him once a day. I think he misses the phone as much as anything."

Was Mrs. Bush being entirely candid? Even if she was, Bush could console himself and his hyperkinetic thyroid with the fact that if there were no calls, there were also no subpoenas. Bush himself added: "A lot of people said, 'You don't know what you're getting into," but on the basis of a month I'm very happy. Sure, the place is very different but I wanted a change of pace. What the hell, I'm 50. It won't hurt anything," said Bush with a whining note of self-pity. [fn 5] The self-pity was a deception this time, since, as we will see, Bush had plenty to do in Beijing. The US Liason Office was located in a walled compound in an area occupied by other foreign missions in a Beijing suburb. A guard from the People's Liberation Army was posted outside at all times. Bush told Oberdorfer that he started the day with the news on the Voice of America, followed by a yoghurt breakfast, then staff meetings and attempts at China-watching deciphering of the editorials of Ren Min Ribao (The People's Daily). At 11:40, Bush and Barbara received their Chinese lesson from their Mandarin teacher, Mrs. Tang. Then came a multicourse lunch. Wednesday and Saturday afternoons were time off, as well as Sundays. Bush tried to attract attention by riding a bicycle to diplomatic engagements. "Everybody was astonished, particularly because it was so different from the dignified manner of David Bruce," said one diplomat. "I think the Chinese probably thought they were doing it for effect." George was having back trouble, and found an osteopath to treat his back at a public bathhouse. Bush's attention-getting ploys had some effect on the Beijing of Mao Tse-tung, or at least on the foreigners. "Bush is an instant success around here, " said a Canadian newsman. "The real test will come, though, when the novelty wears off and his enthusiasm runs down."

NSSM 200

When Bush had been in Beijing for about a month, Henry Kissinger arrived for one of his periodic visits to discuss current business with the Beijing leadership. Kissinger arrived with his usual army of retainers and Secret Service guards. During this visit, Bush went with Kissinger to see Vice-Premier Deng Xiao-ping and Foreign Minister Qiao. This was one of four reported visits by Kissinger that would punctuate Bush's stay.

Bush's tenure in Beijing must be understood in the context of the Malthusian and frankly genocidal policies of the Kissinger White House. These are aptly summed up for reference in the recently declassified National Security Study Memorandum 200, "Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security and Overseas Interests," dated December 10, 1974. [fn 6] NSSM 200, a joint effort by Kissinger and his deputy General Brent Scowcroft, provided a hit list of 13 developing countries for which the NSC posited a "special US political and strategic interest" in population reduction or limitation. The list included India, Bengladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, the Philippines, Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, Ethiopia, and Colombia. Demographic growth in these and other third world nations was to be halted and if possible reversed for the brutal reason that population growth represented increased strategic, and military power for the countries in question.

Population growth, argues NSSM 200, will also increase pressure for the economic and industrial development of these countries, an eventuality which the study sees as a threat to the United States. In addition, bigger populations in the third world are alleged to lead to higher prices and greater scarcity of strategic raw materials. As Kissinger summed up: "Development of a worldwide political and popular committment to population stabilization is fundamental to any effective strategy....The US should encourage LDC leaders to take the lead in advancing family planning." When NSSM 200 goes on to ask, "would food be considered an instrument of national power?" it is clear to all that active measures of genocide are at the heart of the policy being propounded. A later Kissinger report praises the Chinese communist leadership for their committment to population control. During 1975, these Chinese communists, Henry Kissinger and George Bush were to team up to create a demonstration model of the NSSM 200 policy: the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia.

During the time that Bush was in Beijing, the fighting in Vietnam came to an end as the South Vietnamese army collapsed in the face of a large-scale invasion from the north. The insane adventure of Vietnam had been organized by Bush's own Brown Brothers, Harriman/Skull and Bones network. When John F. Kennedy had been elected president in 1960, he had turned to Brown Brothers, Harriman partner Robert Lovett to provide him a list of likely choices for his cabinet. From this list were drawn Rusk and McNamara, the leadings hawks in the cabinet. McGeorge and William Bundy, descendants of the Lowells of Boston, but closely related to the Stimson-Acheson circles, were mainstays of the party of escalation. Henry Cabot Lodge was the US Ambassador in Saigon when the Harriman had insisted on assassinating President Diem, the leader of the country the US was supposedly defending. Harriman, starting as assistant secretary for Southeast Asian affairs, had worked his way up through the Kennedy-Johnson State Department with the same program of expanding the war. Now that Harriman-Lovett policy had led to the inevitable debacle. But the post-war suffering of southeast Asia was only beginning.

Target Cambodia

One of the gambits used by Kissinger to demonstrate to the Beijing communist leaders the utility of rapprochement with the US was the unhappy nation of Cambodia. The pro-US government of Cambodia was headed by Marshal Lon Nol, who had taken power in 1970, the year of the public and massive US ground incursion into the country. By the spring of 1975, while the North Vietnamese advanced on Saigon, the Lon Nol government was fighting for its life against the armed insurrection of the Khmer Rouge communist guerillas, who were supported by mainland China. Kissinger was as anxious as usual to serve the interests of Beijing, and now even more so, because of the alleged need to increase the power of the Chinese and their assets, the Khmer rouge, against the triumphant North Vietnamese. The most important consideration remained to ally with China, the second strongest land power, against the USSR. Secondarily, it was important to maintain the balance of power in Southeast Asia as the US policy collapsed. Kissinger's policy was therefore to jettison the Lon Nol government, and to replace it with the Khmer rouge. George Bush, as Kissinger's liaison man in Beijing, was one of the instruments through which this policy was executed. Bush did his part, and the result is known to world history under the heading of the Pol Pot regime, which committed a genocide against its own population proportionally greater than any other in recent world history.

Until 1970, the government of Cambodia was led by Prince Sihanouk, a former king who had stepped down from the throne to become prime minister. Despite his many limitations, Sihanouk was then, and remains today, the most viable symbol of the national unity and hope for sovereignty of Cambodia. Under Sihanouk, Cambodia had maintained a measure of stability and had above all managed to avoid being completely engulfed by the swirling maelstrom of the wars in Laos and in Vietnam. But during 1969, Nixon and Kissinger had ordered a secret bombing campaign against North Vietnamese troop concentrations on Cambodian territory under the code name of "Menu." This bombing would have been a real and substantive grounds for the impeachment of Nixon, and it did constitute the fourth proposed article of impeachment against Nixon submitted to the House Judiciary Committee on July 30, 1974. But after three articles of impeachment having to do with the Watergate break-ins and subsequent coverup were approved by the committee, the most important article, the one on genocide in Cambodia, was defeated by a vote of 26 to 12.

Cambodia was dragged into the Indo-China war by the US-sponsored coup d'etat in Phnom Penh on March, 1970, which ousted Sihanouk in favor of Marshal Lon Nol of the Cambodian army, whose regime was never able to achieve even a modicum of stability. Shortly thereafter, at the end of April, 1970, Nixon and Kissinger launched a large-scale US military invasion of Cambodia, citing the use of Cambodian territory by the North Vietnamese armed forces for their "Ho Chi Minh trail" supply line to sustain their forces deployed in South Vietnam. The "parrot's beak" area of Cambodia, which extended deep into South Vietnam, was occupied.

Prince Sihanouk, who described himself as a neutralist, established himself in Beijing after the seizure of power by Lon Nol. In May of 1970 he became the titular leader and head of state of a Cambodian government in exile, the Gouvernement Royal d'Union Nationale du Kampuchea, or GRUNK. The GRUNK was in essence a united front between Sihanouk and the Khmer Rouge, with the latter exercising most of the real power and commanding the armed forces and secret police. Sihanouk was merely a figurehead, and he knew it. He told Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci in 1973 that when "they [the Khmer Rouge] no longer need me, they will spit me out like a cherry pit."

During these years, the Cambodian Communist party or Khmer Rouge, which had launched a small guerilla insurrection during 1968, was a negligeable military factor in Cambodia, fielding only a very few thousand guerilla fighters. One of its leaders was Saloth Sar, who had studied in Paris, and who had then sojourned at length in Red China at the height of the Red Guards' agitation. Saloth Sar was one of the most important leaders of the Khmer Rouge, and would later become infamous under his nom de guerre of Pol Pot. Decisive support for Pol Pot and for the later genocidal policies of the Khmer Rouge always came from Beijing, despite the attempts to misguided or lying commentators (like Henry Kissinger) to depict the Khmer Rouge as a creation of Hanoi.

But in the years after 1970, the Khmer Rouge, who were determined immediately to transform Cambodia into a communist utopia beyond the dreams even of the wildest Maoist Red Guards, made rapid gains. The most important single ingedient in the rise of the Khmer Rouge was provided by Kissinger and Nixon, through their systematic campaign of terror bombing against Cambodian territory during 1973. This was called Arclight, and began shortly after the January, 1973 Paris accords on Vietnam. With the pretext of halting a Khmer Rouge attack on Phnom Penh, US forces carried out 79,959 officially confirmed sorties with B-52 and F-111 bombers against targets inside Cambodia, dropping 539,129 tons of explosives. Many of these bombs fell upon the most densely populated sections of Cambodia, including the countryside around Phnom Penh. The number of deaths caused by this genocidal campaign has been estimated as between 30,000 and 500,000. [fn 7] Accounts of the devastating impact of this mass terror bombing leave no doubt that it shattered most of what remained of Cambodian society and provided ideal preconditions for the further expansion of the Khmer Rouge insurgency, in much the same way that the catastrophe of the First World War weakened European society so as to open the door for the mass irrationalist movements of fascism and Bolshevism.

During 1974, the Khmer Rouge consolidated their hold over parts of Cambodia. In these enclaves they showed their characteristic methods of genocide, dispersing the inhabitants of the cities into the countryside, while executing teachers, civil servants, intellectuals-- sometimes all those who could read and write. This policy was remarkably similar to the one being carried out by the US under Theodore Shackley's Operation Phoenix in neighboring South Vietnam, and Kissinger and other officials began to see the potential of the Khmer Rouge for implementing the genocidal population reductions that had now been made the official doctrine of the US regime.

Support for the Khmer Rouge was even more attractive to Kissinger and Nixon because it provided an opportunity for the geopolitical propitiation of the Maoist regime in China. Indeed, in the development of the China card between 1973 and 1975, during most of Bush's stay in Beijing, Cambodia loomed very large as the single most important bilateral issue between the US and Red China. Already in November, 1972 Kissinger told Bush's later prime contact Qiao Guanhua that the US would have no real objection to a Sihanouk-Khmer Rouge government of the type that later emerged: "Whoever can best preserve it [Cambodia] as an independent neutral country, is consistent with our policy, and we believe with yours," said Kissinger [fn 8] Zhou En-lai told Kissinger in February, 1973 that if North Vietnam were to extend its domination over Cambodia, this "would result in even greater problems."

When Bush's predecessor David Bruce arrived in Beijing to open the new US Liason Office in the spring of 1973, he sought contact with Zhou En-lai. On May 18, 1973 Zhou stressed that the only solution for Cambodia would be for North Vietnamese forces to leave that country entirely. A few days later Kissinger told Chinese delegate Huang Hua in New York that US and Red Chinese interests in Cambodia were compatible, since both sought to avoid "a bloc which could support the hegemonial objectives of outside powers," meaning North Vietnam and Hanoi's backers in Moscow. The genocidal terror bombing of Cambodia was ordered by Kissinger during this period. Kissinger was apoplectic over the move by the US Congress to prohibit further bombing of Cambodia after August 15, 1973, which he called "a totally unpredictable and senseless event." [fn 9] Kissinger always pretends that the Khmer Rouge were a tool of Hanoi, and in his Memoirs he spins out an absurd theory that the weakening of Zhou and the ascendancy of the Gang of Four was caused by Kissinger's own inability to keep bombing Cambodia. In reality, Beijing was backing its own allies, the Khmer Rouge, as is obvious from the account that Kissinger himself provides of his meeting with Bush's friend Qiao in October, 1973. [fn 10]

Starting in the second half of 1974, George Bush was heavily engaged on this Sino-Cambodian front, particularly in his contacts with his main negotiating partner, Qiao. Bush had the advantage that secret diplomacy carried on with the Red Chinese regime during those days was subject to very little public scrutiny. The summaries of Bush's dealings with the Red Chinese now await the liberation of the files of the Foreign Ministry in Beijing or of the State Department in Washington, whichever comes first. Bush's involvement on the Cambodian question has been established by later interviews with Prince Sihanouk's chef de cabinet, Pung Peng Cheng, as well as with French and US officials knowledgeable about Bush's activities in Beijing during that time. What we have here is admittedly the tip of the iceberg, the merest hints of the monstrous iniquity yet to be unearthed. [fn 11]

The Khmer Rouge launched a dry-season offensive against Phnom Penh in early 1974, which fells short of its goal. They tried again the following year with a dry season offensive launched on January 1, 1975. Soon supplies to Phnom Penh were cut off, both on the land and along the Mekong River. Units of Lon Nol's forces fought the battle of the Phnom Penh perimeter through March. On April 1, 1975, President Lon Nol resigned and fled the country under the pressure of the US Embassy, who wanted him out as quickly as possible as part of the program to appease Beijing. [fn 12]

When Lon Nol had left the country, Kissinger became concerned that the open conquest of Phnom Penh by the Khmer Rouge communist guerillas would create public relations and political problems for the shakey Ford regime in the United States. Kissinger accordingly became interested in having Prince Sihanouk, the titular head of the insurgent coalition of which the Khmer Rouge were the leading part, travel from Beijing to Phnom Penh so that the new government in Cambodia could be portrayed more as a neutralist-nationalist, and less as a frankly communist, regime. This turns out to be the episode of the Cambodian tragedy in which George Bush's personal involvement is most readily demonstrated.

Prince Sihanouk had repeatedly sought direct contacts with Kissinger. At the end of March, 1975 he tried again to open a channel to Washington, this time with the help of the French Embassy in Beijing. Sihanouk's chef de cabinet Pung Peng Chen requested a meeting with John Holdridge, Bush's deputy chief of station. This meeting was held at the French Embassy. Pung told Holdridge that Prince Sihanouk had a favor to ask of President Ford:

"in [ Sihanouk's ] old home in Phnom Penh were copies of the films of Cambodia he had made in the sixties when he had been an enthusiastic cineaste. They constituted a unique cultural record of a Cambodia that was gone forever: would the Americans please rescue them? Kissinger ordered Dean [ the US Ambassador in Cambodia ] to find the films and also instructed Bush to seek a meeting with Sihanouk. The Prince refused, and during the first ten days of April, as the noose around Phnom Penh tightened, he continued his public tirades" against the US and its Cambodian puppets. [fn 13]

On the same day, April 11, Ford announced that he would not request any further aid for Cambodia from the US Congress, since any aid for Cambodia approved now would be "too late" anyway. Ford had originally been asking for $333 million to save the government of Cambodia. Several days later Ford would reverse himself and renew his request for the aid, but by that time it was really too late.

On April 11 the US Embassy was preparing a dramatic evacuation, but the embassy was being kept open as part of Kissinger's effort to bring Prince Sihanouk back to Phnom Penh.

"It was now, on April 11, 1975, as Dean was telling government leaders he might soon be leaving, that Kissinger decided that Sihanouk should be brought back to Cambodia. In Peking, George Bush was ordered to seek another meeting; that afternoon John Holdridge met once more with Pung Peng Cheng at the French Embassy. The American diplomat explained that Dr. Kissinger and President Ford were now convinced that only the Prince could end the crisis. Would he please ask the Chinese for an aircraft to fly him straight back to Phnomn Penh? The United States would guarantee to remain there until he arrived. Dr. Kissinger wished to impose no conditions." "On April 12 at 5 AM Peking time Holdridge again met with Pung. He told him that the Phnom Penh perimeter was degenerating so fast that the Americans were pulling out at once. Sihanouk had already issued a statement rejecting and denouncing Kissinger's invitation." [fn 14]

Sihanouk had a certain following among liberal members of the US Senate, and his presence in Phnom Penh in the midst of the debacle of the old Lon Nol forces would doubtless have been reassuring for US public opinion. But Sihanouk at this time had no ability to act independently of the Khmer Rouge leaders, who were hostile to him and who held the real power, including the inside track to the Red Chinese. Prince Sihanouk did return to Phnom Penh later in 1975, and his strained relations with Pol Pot and his colleagues soon became evident. Early in 1976, Sihanouk was placed under house arrest by the Khmer Rouge, who appear to have intended to execute him. Sihanouk remained under detention until the North Vietnamese drove Pol Pot and his forces out of Phnom Penh in 1978 and set up their own government there.

In following the Kissinger-Bush machinations to bring Prince Sihanouk back to Cambodia in mid-April, 1975, one is also suspicious that an included option was to increase the likelihood that Sihanouk might be liquidated by the Khmer Rouge. When the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh, they immediately carried out a massacre on a grand scale, slaying any members of the Lon Nol and Long Boret cabinets they could get their hands on. There were mass executions of teachers and government officials, and all of the 2.5 million residents of Phnom Penh were driven into the countryside, including seriously ill hospital patients. Under these circumstances, it would have been relatively easy to assassinate Sihanouk amidst the general orgy of slaughter. Such an eventuality was explicitly referred to in a Kissinger NSC briefing paper circulated in March 1975, in which Sihanouk was quoted as follows in remarks made December 10, 1971: "If I go on as chief of state after victory, I run the risk of being pushed out the window by the Communists, like Masaryk, or that I might be imprisoned for revisionism or deviationism."

More than 2 million Cambodians out of an estimated total population of slightly more than 7 million perished under the Khmer Rouge; according to some estimates, the genocide killed 32% of the total population. [fn 15] The United States and Red China, acting together under the Kissinger "China card" policy, had liquidated one Cambodian government, destroyed the fabric of civil society in the country, ousted a pro-US government, and installed a new regime they knew to be genocidal in its intentions. For Kissinger, it was the exemplification of the new US strategic doctrine contaied in NSSM 200. For George Bush, it was the fulfillment of his family's fanatically held belief in the need for genocide to prevent the more prolific, but inferior races of the earth, in this case those with yellow skins, from "out-breeding" the imperial Anglo-Saxon racial stock. In addition to opportunities to promote genocide, Bush's tenure in Beijing presented him with numerous occasions to exploit public office for the private gain of financiers and businessmen who were a part of his network.

Meeting of the Monsters

In September, 1975, as Ford was preparing for a year-end visit to China, Kissinger organized a Presidential reception at the White House for a delegation from the Beijing China Council for the Promotion of International Trade. This was the first high-level trade delegation to come to the United States from China. The meeting was carefully choreographed by Kissinger and Scowcroft. The Ford Library has preserved a supplementary memo to Scowcroft, at that time the NSC chief, from Richard H. Solomon of the NSC staff, which reads as follows: "Regarding the President's meeting with the Chinese trade group, State has called me requesting that Ambassador Bush and [Kissinger henchman] Phil Habib attend the meeting. You will recall having approved Bush's sitting in on the President's meeting with the Congressional delegation that recently returned from China. Hence, Bush will be floating around the White House at this period of time anyway. I personally think it would be useful to have Bush and Habib sit in. The Cabinet Room should be able to hold them. Win Lord is someone else who might be invited." This meeting was eventually held on September 8, 1975. A little earlier Bush en route to Washington, had sent a hand-written note to Scowcroft dated August 29, 1975. This missive urged Scowcroft to grant a request from Codel Anderson, who had just completed a visit to China complete with a meeting with Deng Xiao-ping, to be allowed to report back to Ford personally. These were the type of contacts which later paid off for Bush's cronies. During 1977, Bush returned to China as a private citizen, taking with him his former Zapata business partner, J. Hugh Liedtke. In January, 1978, Liedtke was on hand when the Chinese oil minister was Bush's guest for dinner at his home in Houston. In May, 1978, Liedtke and Pennzoil were at the top of the Chinese government's list of US oil firms competing to be accorded contracts for drilling in China. Then, in the late summer of 1978, J. Hugh Liedtke of Pennzoil made another trip to China, during which he was allowed to view geological studies which had previously been held as state secrets by Beijing. Pennzoil was in the lead for a contract to begin offshore drilling in the South China sea. [fn 16] Kissinger made four visits to Beijing during Bush's tenure there, three solo appearances and a final junket accompanied by Ford. On October 19, 1975, Kissinger arrived in Beijing to prepare for Ford's visit, set for December. There were talks between Kissinger and Deng Xiao-ping, with Bush, Habib, Winston Lord and Foreign Minister Qiao taking part. It was during this visit that, Bush would have us believe, that he had his first face to face meeting with Mao Tse Tung, the leader of a communist revolution which had claimed the lives of some 100,000,000 Chinese since the end of the Second World War.

Mao, one of the greatest monsters of the twentieth century, was 81 years old at that time. He was in very bad health; when he opened his mouth to meet Kissinger, "only guttural noises emerged." Mao's study contained tables covered with tubes and medical apparatus, and a small oxygen tank. Mao was unable to speak coherently, but had to write Chinese characters and an occasional word in English on a note pad which he showed to his interpreters. Kissinger inquired as to Mao's health. Mao pointed to his head saying, "This part works well. I can eat and sleep." Then Mao tapped his legs: "These parts do not work well. They are not strong when I walk. I also have some trouble with my lungs. In a word, I am not well. I am a showcase for visitors, " Mao summed up. The croaking, guttural voice continued: "I am going to heaven soon. I have already received an invitation from God."

If Mao was a basso profondo of guttural croaking, then Kissinger was at least a bass-baritone: "Don't accept it too soon," he replied. "I accept the orders of the Doctor," wrote Mao on his note pad. Mao at this point had slightly less than a year to live. Bush provided counterpoint to these lower registers with his own whining tenor.

Bush was much impressed by Mao's rustic background and repertiore of Chinese barnyard expressions. Referring to a certain problem in Sino-American relations, Mao dismissed it as no more important than a "fang go pi," no more important than a dog fart. Bush has always had a strange fascination for scatological references, which is probably rooted amid the taboos of his clenched Anglo-Saxon family background, where the boys never heard their father fart. We have seen Bush's obsessive recounting of LBJ's much-told "chicken shit" anecdote about the House of Representatives.

Mao went on, commenting about US military superiority, and then saying: "God blesses you, not us. God does not like us because I am a militant warlord, also a Communist. No, he doesn't like me. He likes you three." Mao pointed to Kissinger, Bush, and Winston Lord. Towards the end of the encounter, this lugubrious monster singled out Bush for special attention. Mao turned to Winston Lord. "This ambassador," said Mao while gesturing towards Bush, "is in a plight. Why don't you come visit ?" "I would be honored," Bush replied according to his own account, "but I'm afraid you're very busy." "Oh, I'm not busy," said Mao."I don't look after internal affairs. I only read the international news. You should really come visit."

Bush claims [fn 17] that he never accepted Chairman Mao's invitation to come around for private talks. Bush says that he was convinced by members of his own staff that Mao did not really mean to invite him, but was only being polite. Was Bush really so reticent, or is this another one of the falsifications with which his official biographies are studded? The world must await the opening of the Beijing and Foggy Bottom archives. In the meantime, we must take a moment to contemplate that gathering of October, 1975 in Chairman Mao's private villa, secluded behind many courtyards and screens in the Chungnanhai enclave of Chinese rulers not far from the Great Hall of the People and Tien An Men, where less than a year later an initial round of pro-democracy demonstrations would be put down in blood in the wake of the funeral of Zhou En-lai.

Mao, Kissinger, and Bush: has history ever seen a tete-a-tete of such mass murderers? Mao, identifying himself with Chin Shih Huang, the first emperor of all of China and founder of the Chin dynasty, who had built the Great Wall, burned the books, and killed the Confucian scholars-- this Mao had massacred ten per cent of his own people, ravaged Korea, strangled Tibet. Kissinger's crimes were endless, from the Middle East to Vietnam, from the oil crisis of 73-74 with the endless death in the Sahel to India-Pakistan, Chile, and many more. Kissinger, Mao, and Bush had collaborated to install the Pol Pot Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, which was now approaching the zenith of its genocidal career. Compared to the other two, Bush may have appeared as an apprentice of genocide: he had done some filibustering in the Caribbean, had been part of the cheering section for the Indonesia massacres of 1965, and then he had become a part of the Kissinger apparatus, sharing in the responsibility for India-Pakistan, the Middle East, Cambodia. But as Bush advanced through his personal cursus honorum, his power and his genocidal dexterity were growing, foreshadowing such future triumphs as the devastation of El Chorillo in Panama in December, 1989, and his later masterwork of savagery, the Gulf war of 1991. By the time of Bush's administration, Anglo-American finance and the International Monetary Fund were averaging some 50,000,000 needless deaths per year in the developing sector.

But Mao, Kissinger, and Bush exchanged pleasantries that day in Mao's sitting room in Chungnanhai. If the shades of Hitler or Stalin had sought admission to that colloqium, they might have been denied entrance. Later, in early December, Gerald Ford, accompanied by his hapless wife and daughter, came to see the moribund Mao for what amounted to a photo opportunity with a living cadaver. The AP wire issued that day hyped the fact that Mao had talked with Ford for 1 hour and fifty minutes, nearly twice as long as the Great Steersman had given to Nixon in 1972. Participants in this meeting included Kissinger, Bush, Scowcroft, and Winston Lord. Even such Kissingerian heavies as Undersecretary of State Joseph Sisco, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, and Richard Solomon of the NSC were not allowed to stay for the meeting. Bush was now truly a leading Kissinger clone. A joint communique issued after this session said that Mao and Ford had had "earnest and significant discussions ...on wide-ranging issues in a friendly atmosphere." At this meeting, Chairman Mao greeted Bush with the words, "You've been promoted." Mao turned to Ford, and added: "We hate to see him go." At a private lunch with Vice Premier Deng Xiao-ping, the rising star of the post-Mao succession, Deng assured Bush that he was considered a friend of the Chinese Communist hierarchy who would always be welcome in China, "even as head of the CIA." For, as we will see, this was to be the next stop on Bush's cursus honorum. Later Kissinger and Bush also met with Qiao Guanhua, still the Foreign Minister. According to newspaper accounts, the phraseology of the joint communique suggested that the meeting had been more than usually cordial. There had also been a two-hour meeting with Deng Xiao-ping reported by the Ford White House as "a constructive exchange of views on a wide range of international issues." At a banquet, Deng used a toast for an anti-Soviet tirade which the Soviet news agency TASS criticized as "vicious attacks." [fn 18] Ford thought, probably because he had been told by Kissinger, that the fact that Mao had accompanied him to the door of his villa after the meeting was a special honor, but he was disabused by Beijing-based correspondents who told him that this was Mao's customary practice. Ford's daughter Susan was sporting a full-length muskrat coat for her trip to the Great Wall. "It's more than I ever expected," she gushed. "I feel like I'm in a fantasy. It's a whole other world." Days after Ford departed from Beijing, Bush also left the Chinese capital. It was time for a new step in his imperial cursus honorum. During his entire stay in Beijing, Bush had never stopped scheming for new paths of personal advancement towards the very apex of power. Before Bush went to Beijing, he had talked to his network asset and crony Rogers C.B. Morton about his favorite topic, his own prospects for future career aggrandizement. Morton at that time was Secretary of Commerce, but he was planning to step down before much longer. Morton told Bush: "What you ought to think about is coming back to Washington to replace me when I leave. It's a perfect springboard for a place on the ticket." This idea is the theme of a Ford White House memo preserved in the Jack Marsh Files at the Ford Library in Ann Arbor. The memo is addressed to Jack Marsh, counsellor to the President, by Russell Rourke of Marsh's staff. The memo, which is dated March 20, 1975, reads as follows: "It's my impression and partial understanding that George Bush has probably had enough of egg rolls and Peking by now (and has probably gotten over his lost V.P. opportunity). He's one hell of a Presidential surrogate, and would be an outstanding spokesman for the White House between now and November '76. Don't you think he would make an outstanding candidate for Secretary of Commerce or a similar post sometime during the next six months?"

The Next Step

Bush was now obsessed with the idea that he had a right to become vice president in 1976. As a member of the senatorial caste, he had a right to enter the senate, and if the plebeians with their changeable humors barred the elective route, then the only answer was to be appointed to the second spot on the ticket and enter the senate as its presiding officer. As Bush wrote in his campaign autobiography: "Having lost out to Rockefeller as Ford's vice presidential choice in 1974, I might be considered by some as a leading contender for the number two spot in Kansas City...." [fn 19]

Bush possessed a remarkable capability for the blackmailing of Ford: he could enter the 1976 Republican presidential primaries as a candidate in his own right, and could occasion a hemorrhaging of liberal Republican support that might otherwise have gone to Ford. Ford, the first non-elected president, was the weakest of all incumbents, and he was already preparing to face a powerful challenge from his right mounted by the Ronald Reagan camp. The presence of an additional rival with Bush's networks among liberal and moderate Republican layers might constitute a fatal impediment to Ford's prospects of getting himself elected to a term of his own.

Accordingly, when Kissinger visited Bush in Beijing in October, 1975, he pointedly inquired as to whether Bush intended to enter any of the Republican presidential primaries during the 1976 season. This was the principal question that Ford had directed Kissinger to ask of Bush. Bush's exit from Beijing occurred within the context of Ford's celebrated Halloween Massacre of early November, 1975. This "massacre," reminiscent of Nixon's cabinet purge of 1973 ("the Saturday night massacre"), was a number of firings and transfers of high officials at the top of the executive branch through which Ford sought to figure forth the political profile which he intended to carry into the primaries and, if he were successful in the winter and spring, into the Republican convention and, beyond that, into the fall campaign. So each of these changes had a purpose that was ultimately rooted in electioneering.

In the Halloween massacre, it was announced that Vice President Nelson Rockefeller would under no circumstances be a candidate to continue in that office. Nelson's negatives were simply too high. James "Rodney the Robot" Schlesinger was summarily ousted as the Secretary of Defense; Schlesinger's "Dr. Strangelove" overtones were judged not presentable during an election year. To replace Schlesinger, Ford's White House chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld was given the Pentagon. Henry Kissinger, who up to this moment had been running the administration from two posts, NSC director and Secretary of State, had to give up his White House office and was obliged to direct the business of the government from Foggy Bottom. In consolation to him, the NSC job was assigned to his devoted clone and later business associate, retired Air Force Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft, a Mormon who would later play the role of exterminating demon during Bush's Gulf war adventure. At the Department of Commerce, the secretary's post that had been so highly touted to Bush was being vacated by Rogers Morton. Finally, William Colby, his public reputation thoroughly delapidated as a result of the revelations made during the Church Committee and Pike Committee investigations of the abuses and crimes of the CIA, especially within the US domestic sphere, was canned as Director of Central Intelligence.

Could this elaborate reshuffle be made to yield a job for Bush? It was anything but guaranteed. The post of CIA director was offerred to Washington lawyer and influence broker Edward Bennett Williams. But he turned it down.

Then there was the post at Commerce. This was one that Bush came very close to getting. In the Jack Marsh files at the Gerald Ford Library there is a draft marked "Suggested cable to George Bush," but which is undated. The telegram begins: "Congratulations on your selection by the President as Secretary of Commerce." The job title is crossed out, and "Director of the Central Intelligence Agency" is pencilled in.

So Bush almost went to Commerce, but then was proposed for Langley instead. Bush in his campaign autobiography suggests that the CIA appointment was a tactical defeat, the one new job that was more or less guaranteed to keep him off the GOP ticket in 1976. As CIA Director, if he got that far, he would have to spend "the next six months serving as point man for a controversial agency being investigated by two major Congressional committees. The scars left by that experience would put me out of contention, leaving the spot open for others." [fn 20] Bush suggests that "the Langley thing" was the handiwork of Donald Rumsfeld, who had a leading role in designing the reshuffle. (Some time later William Simon confided privately that he himself had been targetted for proscription by "Rummy," who was more interested in the Treasury than he was in the Pentagon.)

On All Saints' Day, November 1, 1975, Bush received a telegram from Kissinger informing him that "the President is planning to announce some major personnel shifts on Monday, November 3, at 7:30 PM, Washington time. Among those shifts will be the transfer of Bill Colby from CIA. The President asks that you consent to his nominating you as the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency." [fn 21]

Bush promptly accepted.

Return to the Table of Contents

NOTES:

1. Al Reinert, "Bob and George Go To Washington or The Post-Watergate Scramble" in Texas Monthly, April 1974.

8. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston, 1982), p. 341. This second volume of Kissinger's memoirs, published when his close ally Bush had already become vice president, has much less to say about George's activities, with only one reference to him in more than 1200 pages. We see again that Bush prefers that most of his actual record remain covert.

12. Lt. Gen. Sak Sutsakhan, the leader of the last Cambodian government before the advent of the Khmer Rouge, argues that the victory of the communists was not a foregone conclusion, and that modest American aid, in the form of 20 aircraft and a few dozen obsolescent tanks waiting for delivery in Thailand, could have materially changed the military outcome. See Sutsakhan's The Khmer Republic at War and the Final Collapse (Washington, DC), pp. 163, 166. 1

3. Shawcross, Sideshow, p. 360.

14. Shawcross, Sideshow, p. 361.

15. Cambodia: A Country Study, p. 51.

16. Forbes, September 4, 1978.

17. See Bush and Gold, pp. 145-149 for Bush's account of his alleged first meeting with Mao.

AHA! This is where/what I was looking for! What the catalyst was for arriving where we ARE right now-which stone laid was the cornerstone movement?

I'll highlight the time which was also declared in the timeline passage. I'm also going to edit the paragraphs, breaking them up for easier readablities and quicker assimilation.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Chapter -XII- Chairman George in Watergate

In November, 1972, Bush's "most influential patron," Richard Nixon [fn 1], won re-election to the White House for a second term in a landslide victory over the McGovern-Shriver Democratic ticket. Nixon's election victory had proceeded in spite of the arrest of five White House-linked burglars in the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate building in Washington early on June 17 of the same year.

This was the beginning of the infamous Watergate scandal, which would overshadow and ultimately terminate Nixon's second term in 1974.

After the election, Bush received a telephone call informing him that Nixon wanted to talk to him at the Camp David retreat in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland.

Bush had been looking to Washington for the inevitable personnel changes that would be made in preparation for Nixon's second term. Bush tells us that he was aware of Nixon's plan to reorganize his cabinet around the idea of a "super cabinet" of top-level, inner cabinet ministers or "super secretaries" who would work closely with the White House while relegating the day-to-day functioning of their executive departments to sub-cabinet deputies.

One of the big winners under this plan was scheduled to be George Shultz, the former Labor Secretary who was now, after the departure of Connally, supposed to become Super Secretary of the Treasury.

Shultz was a Bechtel executive who went on to be Reagan's second Secretary of State after Al Haig.

Bush and Shultz were future members of the Bohemian Club of San Francisco and of the Bohemian Grove summer gathering. Shultz was a Princeton graduate who was reputed to have a tiger, the school's symbol, tatooed on his rump.

Bush says he received a call from Nixon's top domestic aide, John Ehrlichman (along with Haldemann a partner in the "Chinese wall" around Nixon maintained by the White House palace guard). Ehrlichman told Bush that George Shultz wanted to see him before he went on to meet with Nixon at Camp David.

As it turned out, Shultz wanted to offer Bush the post of undersecretary of the Treasury, which would amount to de facto administrative control over the department while Shultz concentrated on his projected super secretary policy functions. Bush says he thanked Shultz for his "flattering" offer, took it under consideration, and then pressed on to Camp David.

[fn 2] At Camp David, Bush says that Nixon talked to him in the following terms: "George, I know that Shultz has talked to you about the Treasury job, and if that's what you'd like, that's fine with me. However, the job I really want you to do, the place I really need you, is over at the National Committee running things. This is an important time for the Republican Party, George. We have a chance to build a new coalition in the next four years, and you're the one who can do it."

[ fn 3] But this was not the job that George really wanted. He wanted to be promoted, but he wanted to continue in the personal retinue of Henry Kissinger. "At first Bush tried to persuade the President to give him, instead, the number-two job at the State Department, as deputy to Secretary Henry Kissinger. Foreign affairs was his top priority, he said. Nixon was cool to this idea, and Bush capitulated." [fn 4] According to Bush's own account, he asked Nixon for some time to ponder the offer of the RNC chairmanship.

Among those who Bush said he consulted on whether or not to accept was Rogers C.B. Morton, the former Congressman whom Nixon had made Secretary of Commerce. Morton suggested that if Bush wanted to accept, he insist that he continue as a member of the Nixon cabinet, where, it should be recalled, he had been sitting since he was named to the UN.

Pennsylvania Senator Hugh Scott, one of the Republican Congressional leaders, also advised Bush to demand to continue on in the cabinet: "Insist on it," Bush recalls him saying. Bush also consulted Barbara. The story goes that Bar had demanded that George pledge that the one job he would never take was the RNC post. But now he wanted to take precisely that post, which appeared to be a political graveyard, George explained his wimpish obedience to Nixon: "Boy, you can't turn a President down." [fn 5] Bush then told Ehrlichman that he would accept provided he could stay on in the cabinet. Nixon approved this condition, and the era of Chairman George had begun.

Of course, making the chairman of the Republican Party an ex- officio member of the president's cabinet seems to imply something resembling a one-party state. But George was not deterred by such difficulties.

While he was at the UN, Bush had kept his eyes open for the next post on the way up his personal cursus honorum. In November of 1971 there was a boomlet for Bush among Texas Republican leaders who were looking for a candidate to run for governor. [fn 6] Nixon's choice of Bush to head the RNC was announced on December 11, 1972.

The outgoing RNC Chariman was Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, an asset of the grain cartel but, in that period, not totally devoid of human qualities. According to press reports, Nixon palace guard heavies like Haldeman and Charles W. Colson, later a central Watergate figure, were not happy with Dole because he would not take orders from the White House.

Dole also tended to function as a conduit for grass roots complaints and resistance to White House directives from the GOP rank and file. In the context of the 1972 campaign, "White House" means specifically Clark MacGregor's Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), one of the collective protagonists of the Watergate scandal. [fn 7] Dole was considered remarkable for his "irreverence" for Nixon: "he joked about the Watergate issue, about the White House staff and about the management of the Republican convention with its `spontaneous demonstrations that will last precisely ten minutes.'"

[ fn 8] Bush's own account of how he got the RNC post ignores Dole, who was Bush's most serious rival for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination. According to Dole's version, he conferred with Nixon about the RNC post on November 28, and told the president that he would have to quit the RNC in 1973 in order to get ready to run for re-election in 1974. According to Dole, it was he who recommended Bush to Nixon. Dole even said that he had gone to New York to convince Bush to accept the post. Dole sought to remove any implication that he had been fired by Nixon, and contradicted "speculation that I went to the mountaintop to be pushed off," for "that was not the case."

What was clear was that Nixon and retainers had chosen a replacement for Dole whom they expected to be more obedient to the commands of the White House palace guard. Bush assumed his new post in January, 1973, in the midst of the trial of the Watergate burglars.

He sought at once to convey the image of a pragmatic technocrat on the lookout for Republican candidates who could win, rather than an ideologue. {he never has realized how creepy he comes off...lol}"There's kind of a narrow line between standing for nothing and imposing one's views," Bush told the press.

He stressed that the RNC would have a lot of money to spend for recruiting candidates, and that he would personally control this money. "The White House is simply not going to control the budget," said Bush. "I believe in the importance of this job and I have confidence I can do it," he added. "I couldn't do it if I were some reluctant dragon {} being dragged away from a three-wine luncheon."

[fn 9] Bush appointed Tom Lias as his principal political assistant. Harry Dent, the former chief counsel to Nixon, was named the chief counsel to the GOP. Dent had been one of the ideologues of the party's southern strategy. D.K. "Pat" Wilson became the party finance chairman, and Rep. William Steiger of Wisconsin became the leader of a special committee that was supposed to broaden the electoral base of the party. Steiger was immediately attacked by the right-wing Human Events magazine as "very much a part of the defeated liberal reform movement" in the party. [fn 10] Richard Thaxton was the RNC patronage director. John Lofton, the editor of the GOP weekly journal called Monday, was eased out, and went to join Howard Phillips in the task of liquidating the Office of Economic Opportunity.

Janet J. Johnston of California became the RNC co- chair. Bush inaugurated his new post with a pledge that the Republican Party, from President Nixon on down, would do "everything we possibly can" to make sure that the GOP was not involved in political dirty tricks in the future.

"I don't think it is good for politics in this country and I am sure I am reflecting the President's views on that as head of the party," intoned Bush in an appearance on "Issues and Answers."

[fn 11] Whether or not Bush lived up to that pledge during his months at the RNC, and indeed during his later political career, will be sufficiently answered during the following pages. But now Chairman George, sitting in Nixon's cabinet with such men as John Mitchell, his eyes fixed on Henry Kissinger as his lodestar, is about to set sail on the turbulent seas of the Watergate typhoon.

Before we accompany him, we must briefly review the complex of events lumped together under the heading of "Watergate," so that we may then situate Bush's remarkable and bizarre behavior between January 1973 and August of 1974, when Nixon's fall became the occasion for yet another Bush attempt to seize the vice presidency.

By the beginning of the 1990's, it has become something of a commonplace to refer to the complex of events surrounding the fall of Nixon as a coup d'etat.

[fn 12] It was to be sure a coup d'etat, but one whose organizers and beneficiaries most commentators and historians are reluctant to name, much less to confront.

Broadly speaking, Watergate was a coup d'etat which was instrumental in laying the basis for the specific new type of authoritarian-totalitarian regime which now rules the United States.

The purpose of the coup was to rearrange the dominant institutions of the US government so as to enhance their ability to carry out policies agreeable to the increasingly urgent dictates of the British-dominated Morgan- Rockefeller-Mellon-Harriman financier faction.

The immediate beneficiaries of the coup have been that class of bureaucratic, technocratic administrators who have held the highest public offices, exercising power in many cases almost without interruption, since the days of the Watergate scandal.

It is obvious that George Bush himself is one of the most prominent of such beneficiaries. As the Roman playwright Seneca warns us, "Cui prodest scelus, is fecit"-- the one who derives advantage from the crime is the one most likely to have committed it.

The policies of the Wall Street investment banking interests named are those of usury and Malthusianism, stressing the decline of a productive industrial economy in favor of savage Third World looting and anti-population measures.

The changes subsumed by Watergate included the abolition of government's function as a means to distribute the rewards and benefits of economic progress among the principal constituency groups upon whose support the shifting political coalitions depended for their success.

Henceforth, government would appear as the means by which the sacrifices and penalties of austerity and declining standards of living would be imposed on a passive and stupefied population. The constitutional office of the president was to be virtually destroyed, and the power of the usurious banking elites above and behind the presidency was to be radically enhanced.

The reason why the Watergate scandal escalated into the overthrow of Nixon has to do with the international monetary crisis of those years, and with Nixon's inability to manage the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and the US dollar in a way satisfactory to the Anglo-American financial elite.

It was the leading Anglo-American financier factions who decided to dump Nixon, and availed themselves of the pre-existing Watergate affair in order to reach their goal. The financiers were able to implement their decision all the more easily thanks to the numerous operatives of the intelligence community who had been embedded within the Plumbers from the moment of their creation in response to an explicit demand coming from George Bush's personal mentor, Henry Kissinger.

Watergate included the option of rapid steps in the direction of a dictatorship not so much of the military as of the intelligence community and the law enforcement agencies acting as executors of the will of the Wall Street circles indicated. The "Seven Days in May" overtone of Watergate, the more or less overt break with constitutional forms and rituals was never excluded. We must recall that the backdrop for Watergate had been provided first of all by the collapse of the international monetary system, as made official by Nixon's austerity decrees imposing a wage and price freeze starting on the fateful day of August 15, 1971.

What followed was an attempt to run the entire US economy under the top-down diktat of the Pay Board and the Price Commission. This economic state of emergency was then compounded by the artificial oil shortages orchestrated by the companies of the international oil cartel during late 1973 and 1974, all in the wake of Kissinger's October 1973 Middle East War and the Arab oil boycott.

In August, 1974, when Gerald Ford decided to make Nelson Rockefeller, and not George Bush, his vice-president designate, he was actively considering further executive orders to declare a new economic state of emergency.

Such colossal economic dislocations had impelled the new Trilateral Commission and such theorists as Samuel Huntington to contemplate the inherent ungovernability of democracy and the necessity of beginning a transition towards forms that would prove more durable under conditions of aggravated economomic breakdown.

Ultimately, much to the disappointment of George Bush, whose timetable of boundless personal ambition and greed for power had once again surged ahead of what his peers of the ruling elite were prepared to accept, the perspectives for a more overtly dictatorial form of regime came to be embodied in the figure of Vice President Nelson Rockefeller.

Skeptics will point to the humiliating announcement, made by President Ford within the context of his 1975 "Halloween massacre" reshuffle of key posts, that Rockefeller would not be considered for the 1976 vice presidential nomination.

But Rockefeller, thanks to the efforts of Sarah Jane Moore and Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, each of whom attempted to assassinate Ford, had already come very close to the Oval Office on two separate occasions.

Ford himself was reputedly one of the most exalted Freemasons ever to occupy the presidency.

Preponderant power during the last years of Nixon and during the Ford years was in any case exercised by Henry Kissinger, the de facto president,{is he still? rather than Daddy Bush? seems like his plays coming to fruition now} about whose pedigree and strategy something has been said above.

The preserving of constitutional form and ritual as a hollow facade behind which to realize practices more and more dictatorial in their substance was a typical pragmatic adaptation made possible by the ability of the financiers to engineer the slow and gradual decline of the economy, avoiding upheavals of popular protest.

But in retrospect there can be no doubt that Watergate was a coup d'etat, a creeping and muffled cold coup in the institutions which has extended its consequences over almost two decades. The roots of the administrative fascism of the Reagan and Bush years are to be found in the institutional tremors and changed power relations set off by the banal farce of the Watergate break-in. {and banal farce describes it perfectly-too stupid to have even been enacted really}

In the view of the dominant school of pro-regime journalism, the essence of the Watergate scandal lies in the illegal espionage and surveillance activity of the White House covert operations team, the so-called Plumbers, who are alleged to have been caught during an attempt to burglarize the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office building near the Potomac. The supposed goal of the break-in was to filch information and documents while planting bugs.

According to the official legend of the Washington Post and Hollywood,{co players then as are now} Nixon and his retainers responded to the arrest of the burglars by compounding their original crime with obstruction of justice and all of the abuses of a coverup. Then the Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, dedicated partizans of the truth, blew the story open with the help of Woodward's mysterious source Deep Throat, setting into motion the investigation of the Senate committee under Sam Ervin, leading to impeachment proceedings by Rep. Peter Rodino's House Judiciary Committee which ultimately forced Nixon to resign.

The received interpretation of the salient facts of the Watergate episode is a fantastic and grotesque distortion of historical truth.

Even the kind of cursory examination of the facts in Watergate which we can permit ourselves within the context of a biography of Watergate figure George Bush will reveal that the actions which caused the fall of Nixon cannot be reduced to the simplistic account just summarized. There is, for example, the question of the infiltration of the White House staff and of the Plumbers themselves by members and assets of the intelligence community whose loyalty was not to Nixon, but to the Anglo-American financier elite.

This includes the presence among the Plumbers of numerous assets of the Central Intelligence Agency, and specifically of the CIA bureaus traditionally linked to George Bush, such as the Office of Security- Security Research Staff and the Miami Station with its pool of Cuban operatives.

The Plumbers were created at the demand of Henry Kissinger, who told Nixon that something had to be done to stop leaks in the wake of the "Pentagon Papers" affair of 1971.

But if the Plumbers were called into existence by Kissinger, they were funded through a mechanism set up by Kissinger clone George Bush.

A salient fact about the White House Special Investigations Unit (or Plumbers) of 1971-72 is that the money used to finance it was provided by George Bush's business partner and lifelong intimate friend, Bill Liedtke, the president of Pennzoil.

Bill Liedtke was a regional finance chairman for the Nixon campaigns of 1968 and 1972, and he was one of the most successful, reportedly exceeding his quota by the largest margin among all his fellow regional chairmen.

Liedtke says that he accepted this post as a personal favor to George Bush.

In 1972, Bill Liedtke raised $700,000 in anonymous contributions, including what appears to have been a single contribution of $100,000 that was laundered through a bank account in Mexico.

According to Harry Hurt, part of this money came from Bush's bosom crony Robert Mosbacher, now Secretary of Commerce. According to one account, "two days before a new law was scheduled to begin making anonymous donations illegal, the $700,000 in cash, checks, and securities was loaded into a briefcase at Pennzoil headquarters and picked up by a company vice president, who boarded a Washington- bound Pennzoil jet and delivered the funds to the Committee to Re- elect the President at ten o'clock that night." [fn 14]

These Mexican checks were turned over first to Maurice Stans of the CREEP, who transferred them in turn to Watergate burglar Gordon Liddy. Liddy passed them on to Bernard Barker, one of the Miami station Cubans arrested on the night of the final Watergate break- in. Barker was actually carrying some of the cash left over from these checks when he was apprehended.

When Barker was arrested, his bank records were subpoenaed by the Dade County, Florida district attorney, Richard E. Gerstein, and were obtained by Gerstein's chief investigator, Martin Dardis. As Dardis told Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post, about $100,000 in four cashier's checks had been issued in Mexico City by Manuel Ogarrio Daguerre, a prominent lawyer who handled Stans' money-laundering operation there. [fn 15]

Liedtke eventually appeared before three grand juries investigating the different aspects of the Watergate affair, but neither he nor Pennzoil was ever brought to trial for the CREEP contributions. But it is a matter of more than passing interest that the money for the Plumbers came from one of Bush's intimates and at the request of Bush, a member of the Nixon Cabinet from February, 1971 on. How much did Bush himself know about the activities of the Plumbers, and when did he know it?

The U.S. House of Representatives Banking and Currency Committee, chaired by Texas Democrat Wright Patman, soon began a vigorous investigation of the money financing the break-in, large amounts of which were found as cash in the pockets of the burglars.

Chairman Patman opened the following explosive leads: Patman confirmed that the largest amount of the funds going into Miami bank account of Watergate burglar Bernard Barker, a CIA operative since the Bay of Pigs invasion, was the $100,000 sent in by Texas CREEP chairman William Liedtke, longtime business partner of George Bush.

The money was sent from Houston down to Mexico, where it was "laundered" to eliminate its accounting trail. It then came back to Barker's account as four checks totalling $89,000 and $11,000 in cash. A smaller amount,an anonymous $25,000 contribution, was sent in by Minnesota CREEP officer Kenneth Dahlberg in the form of a cashier's check.

Patman relentlessly pursued the true sources of this money, as the best route to the truth about who ran the break-in, and for what purpose. CREEP national chairman Maurice Stans later described the situation just after the burglars were arrested, made dangerous by "...Congressman Wright Patman and several of his political hatchet men working on the staff of the House Banking and Currency Committee.

Without specific authorization by his committee, Patman announced that he was going to investigate the Watergate matter, using as his entry the banking transactions of the Dahlberg and Mexican checks. In the guise of covering that ground, he obviously intended to roam widely, and he almost did, but his own committee, despite its Democratic majority, eventually stopped him." [fn 16]

These are the facts that Patman had established--before "his own committee...stopped him."

The anonymous Minnesota $25,000 had in fact been provided to Dahlberg by Dwayne Andreas, chief executive of the Archer-Daniels- Midland grain trading company.

The Texas $100,000, sent by Liedtke, in fact came from Robert H. Allen, a mysterious nuclear weapons materials executive. Allen was chairman of Gulf Resources and Chemical Corporation in Houston. His company controlled half the world's supply of lithium, an essential component of hydrogen bombs.

On April 3, 1972 (75 days before the Watergate arrests), $100,000 was transferred by telephone from a bank account of Gulf Resources and Chemical Corp. into a Mexico City account of an officially defunct subsidiary of Gulf Resources. Gulf Resources' Mexican lawyer Manuel Ogarrio Daguerre withdrew it and sent back to Houston the package of four checks and cash, which Liedtke forwarded for the CIA burglars. [fn 17]

Robert H. Allen was Texas CREEP's chief financial officer, while Bush partner William Liedtke was overall chairman. But what did Allen represent? In keeping with its strategic nuclear holdings, Allen's Gulf Resources was a kind of committee of the main components of the London-New York oligarchy. Formed in the late 1960's, Gulf Resources had taken over the New York-based Lithium Corporation of America. The president of this subsidiary was Gulf Resources executive vice president Harry D. Feltenstein, Jr. John Roger Menke, a director of both Gulf Resources and Lithium Corp., was also a consultant and director of the United Nuclear Corporation, and a diretor of the Hebrew Technical Institute. The ethnic background of the Lithium subsidiary is of interest due to Israel's known preoccupation with developing a nuclear weapons arsenal. Another Gulf Resources and Lithium Corp. director was Minnesotan Samuel H. Rogers, who was also a director of Dwayne Andreas's Archer-Daniels-Midland Corp. Andreas was a large financial backer of the "Zionist Lobby" through the Anti-Defamation League of B'Nai B'Rith.

Gulf Resources chairman Robert H. Allen received the "Torch of Liberty" award of the Anti-Defamation League in 1982. Allen was a white Anglo-Saxon conservative. No credible reason for this award was supplied to the press, and the ADL stated their satisfaction that Mr. Allen's financing of the Watergate break-in was simply a mistake, now in the distant past.

From the beginning of Gulf Resources, there was always a representative on its board of New York's Bear Stearns firm, whose partner Jerome Kohlberg, Jr., pioneered leveraged buyouts and merged with Bush's Henry Kravis. The most prestigious board member of Allen's Gulf Resources was George A. Butler, otherwise the chairman of Houston's Post Oak Bank. Butler represented the ultra-secretive W. S. ("Auschwitz") Farish III, confidant of George Bush and U.S. host of Queen Elizabeth. Farish was the founder and controlling owner of Butler's Post Oak Bank, and was chairman of the bank's executive committee as of 1988. [fn 18]

A decade after Watergate, it was revealed that the Hunt family had controlled about 15 per cent of Gulf Resources shares. This Texas oil family hired George Bush in 1977 to be the executive committee chairman of their family enterprise, the First International Bank in Houston. In the 1980s, Ray Hunt secured a massive oil contract with the ruler of North Yemen under the sponsorship of then-Vice President Bush. Ray Hunt continues in the 1991-92 presidential campaign as George Bush's biggest Texas financial angel.

Here, in this one powerful Houston corporation, we see early indications of the alliance of George Bush with the "Zionist lobby"--an alliance which for political reasons the Bush camp wishes to keep covert. These, then, are the Anglo-American moguls whose money paid for the burglary of the Watergate Hotel.

It was their money that Richard Nixon was talking about on the famous "smoking gun" tape which lost him the Presidency. (In 1983, British investor Alan Clore moved in for a hostile takeover of Gulf Resources and Chemical Corp. Senator John Tower, Republican from Texas, argued that the government should stop the takeover on grounds of "national security", since the company controlled the materials for the world's nuclear weapons. Certainly, the management of such an enterprise is closely supervised by the U.S. intelligence community. It is then obvious why a Congressional probe that led through Liedtke and Bush to the secret services had to be sabotaged.)

On Oct. 3, 1972, the House Banking and Currency Committee voted 20-15 against continuing chairman Wright Patman's investigation. The vote prevented the issuance of 23 subpoenas for CREEP officials to come testify to Congress. The margin of protection to the moguls was provided by six Democratic members of the Committee who voted with the Republicans against chairman Patman. As CREEP chairman Maurice Stans put it, "There were...indirect approaches to Democratic [committee] members.

An all-out campaign was conducted to see that the investigation was killed off, as it successfully was." Certain elements of this infamous "campaign" are known. Banking Committee member Frank Brasco, a lib`eral Democratic Congressman from New York, voted to stop the probe. New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller had arranged a meeting between Brasco and U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell. Brasco was a target of a Justice Department investigation for alleged fraud and bribery since 1970, and Mitchell successfully warned Brasco not to back Patman. Later, in 1974, Brasco was convicted of bribery.

Before Watergate, both John Mitchell and Henry Kissinger had FBI reports implicating California Congressman Richard Hanna in the receipt of illegal campaign contributions from the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. Hanna surprised Patman by voting against the investigation. Hanna was later (1978) convicted for his role in the Koreagate scandal in 1978.

The secretary of Congressman William Chappell complained in 1969 that the Florida Democrat had forced her to kick back some of her salary. The Justice Department, holding this information, had declined to prosecute. Chappell, a member of the Banking Committee, voted to stop Patman's investigation. Kentucky Democratic Congressman William Curlin, Jr., revealed in 1973 that "certain members of the committee were reminded of various past political indiscretions, or of relatives who might suffer as a result of [a] pro-subpoena vote." The Justice Department worked overtime to smear Patman, including an attempt to link him to "Communist agents" in Greece. [fn 19]

The day before the Committee vote, the Justice Department released a letter to Patman claiming that any Congressional investigation would compromise the rights of the accused Watergate burglars before their trial.{how righteous of them}

House Republican leader Gerald Ford led the attack on Patman from within the Congress. Though he later stated his regrets for this vicious campaign, his eventual reward was the U.S. Presidency.

Cancelling the Patman probe meant that there would be no investigation of Watergate before the 1972 Presidential election.

The Washington Post virtually ended reference to the Watergate affair, and spoke of Nixon's opponent, George McGovern, as unqualified for the Presidency. {}

The Republican Party was handed another four year Administration. Bush, Kissinger, Rockefeller and Ford were the gainers. But then Richard Nixon became the focus of all Establishment attacks for Watergate, while the money trail that Patman had pursued was forgotten. Wright Patman was forced out of his Committee chairmanship in 1974. On the day Nixon resigned the Presidency, Patman wrote to Peter Rodino, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, asking him not to stop investigating Watergate. Though Patman died in 1976, his advice still holds good.{I wonder how many of the others who didn't end up prosecuted for their own selling outs-also died?} ***

As the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover told the journalist Andrew Tully in the days before June, 1972, "By God, he's [Nixon's] got some former CIA men working for him that I'd kick out of my office. Someday, that bunch will serve him up a fine mess." [fn 20]

The CIA men in question were among the Plumbers, a unit allegedly created in the first place to stanch the flow of leaks, including the Jack Anderson material about such episodes as the December, 1971 brush with nuclear war discussed above. Leading Plumbers included retired high officials of the CIA. Plumber and Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt had been a GS-15 CIA staff officer; he had played a role in the 1954 toppling of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, and later had been one of the planners in the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961.

After the failure of the Bay of Pigs, Hunt is thought to have been a part of the continuing CIA attempts to assassinate Castro, code-named Operation Mongoose, ongoing at the time of the Kennedy assassination. All of this puts him in the thick of the CIA Miami station. One of Hunt's close personal friends was Howard Osborne, an official of the CIA Office of Security who was the immediate superior of James McCord. In the spring of 1971 Hunt went to Miami to recruit from among the Cubans the contingent of Watergate burglars, including Bernard Barker, Eugenio Martinez, and the rest. This was two months before the publication of the Pentagon Papers, leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, provided Kissinger with the pretext he needed to get Nixon to initiate what would shortly become the Plumbers.

Another leading Watergate burglar was James McCord, a former top official of the CIA Office of Security, the agency bureau which is supposed to maintain contacts with US police agencies in order to facilitate its basic task of providing security for CIA installations and personnel.

The Office of Security was thus heavily implicated in the CIA's illegal domestic operations, including cointelpro operations against political dissidents and groups, and was the vehicle for such mind-control experiments as Operations Bluebird, Artichoke, and MK-Ultra. The Office of Security also utilized male and female prostitutes and other sex operatives for purposes of compromising and blackmailing public figures, information gathering, and control.

According to Hougan, the Office of Security maintained a "fag file" of some 300,000 US citizens, with heavy stress on homosexuals. The Office of Security also had responsibility for Soviet and other defectors. James McCord was at one time responsible for the physical security of all CIA premises in the US. McCord was also a close friend of CIA Counterintelligence Director James Jesus Angleton.

McCord was anxious to cover the CIA's role; at one point he wrote to his superior, General Gaynor, urging him to "flood the newspapers with leaks or anonymous letters" to discredit those who wanted to establish the responsibility of "the company." [fn 21] But according to one of McCord's own police contacts, Garey Bittenbender of the Washington DC police Intelligence Division, who recognized him after his arrest, McCord had averred to him that the Watergate break-ins had been "a CIA operation," an account which McCord heatedly denied later. [fn 22]

The third leader of the Watergate burglars, G. Gordon Liddy, had worked for the FBI and the Treasury. Liddy's autobiography, Will, published in 1980, and various statements show that Liddy's world outlook had a number of similarities with that of George Bush: he was, for example, obsessed with the maintenance and transmission of his "family gene pool."

Another key member of the Plumbers unit was John Paisley, who functioned as the official CIA liaison to the White House investigative unit. It was Paisley who assumed responsibility for the overall "leak analysis," that is to say, for defining the problem of unauthorized divulging of classified material which the Plumbers were supposed to combat. Paisley, along with Howard Osborne of the Office of Security, met with the Plumbers, led by Kissinger operative David Young, at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia on August 9, 1971.

Paisley's important place on the Plumbers' roster is most revealing, since Paisley was later to become an important appointee of CIA Director George Bush. In the middle of 1976, Bush decided to authorize a group of experts, ostensibly from outside of the CIA, to produce an analysis which would be compared with the CIA's own National Intelligence Estimates on Soviet capabilities and intentions. The panel of outside experts was given the designation of "Team B." Bush chose Paisley to be the CIA's "coordinator" of the three subdivisions of Team B. Paisley would later disappear while sailing on Chesapeake Bay in September of 1978.

In a White House memorandum by David Young summarizing the August 9, 1971 meeting between the Plumbers and the official CIA leaders, we find that Young "met with Howard Osborn and a Mr. Paisley to review what it was that we wanted CIA to do in connection with their files on leaks from January, 1969 to the present." There then follows a fourteen-point list of leaks and their classification, including the frequency of leaks associated with certain jourmalists, the gravity of the leaks, the frequency of the leaks, and so forth. A data base was called for, and "it was decided that Mr. Paisley would get this done by next Monday, August 16, 1971." On areas where more clarification was needed, the memo noted, "the above questions should be reviewed with Paisley within the next two days." [fn 23]

The lesser Watergate burglars came from the ranks of the CIA Miami Station Cubans: Bernard Barker, Eugenio Martinez, Felipe de Diego, Frank Surgis, Virgilio Gonzalez, and Reinaldo Pico. Once they had started working for Hunt, Martinez asked the Miami Station Chief, Jake Esterline, if he was familiar with the activities now being carried out under White House cover. Esterline in turn asked Langley for its opinion of Hunt's White House position. A reply was written by Cord Meyer, later openly profiled as a Bush admirer, to Deputy Director for Plans (that is to say, covert operations) Thomas Karamessines. The import of Meyer's directions to Esterline was that the latter should "not ...concern himself with the travels of Hunt in Miami, that Hunt was on domestic White House business of an unknown nature and that the Chief of Station should 'cool it.'" [fn 24]

During the spring of 1973, George Bush was no longer simply a long-standing member of the Nixon Cabinet. He was also, de facto, a White House official, operating out of the same Old Executive Office Building (or old State-War-Navy) which is adjacent to the Executive Mansion and forms part of the same security compound.

As we read, for example, in the Jack Anderson "Washington Merry-Go- Round" column for March 10, 1973, in the Washington Post: "Washington Whirl- Bush's Office--Republican National Chairman George Bush, as befitting the head of a party whose coffers are overflowing, has been provided with a plush office in the new Eisenhower Building here. He spends much of his time, however, in a government office next to the White House. When we asked how a party official rated a government office, a GOP spokesman explained that the office wasn't assigned to him but was merely a visitor's office. The spokesman admitted, however, that Bush spends a lot of time there." This means that Bush's principal office was in the building where Nixon most liked to work; Nixon had what was called his "hideaway" office in the OEOB. How often did George drop in on Dick, or Dick on George, or how often did they just meet in the hall?

As to the state of George's relations with Nixon at this time, we have the testimony of a "Yankee Republican" who had known and liked father Prescott, as cited by journalist Al Reinert: "I can't think of a man I've ever known for whom I have greater respect than Pres Bush...I've always been kind of sorry his son turned out to be such a jerk. George has been kissing Nixon's ass ever since he came up here." [fn 25] Reinert comments that "when Nixon became president, Bush became a teacher's pet," "a presidential favorite, described in the press as one of 'Nixon's men.'"

On the surface George was an ingratiating sycophant. But he dissembled. The Nixon White House would seem to have included at least one highly placed official who betrayed his president to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, making it possible for that newspaper to repeatedly outflank Nixon's attempts at stonewalling. This was the celebrated, and still anonymous source Woodward called "Deep Throat."

Al Haig has often been accused of having been the figure of the Nixon White House who provided Woodward and Bernstein with their leads. If there is any consensus about the true identity of Deep Throat, it would appear to be that Al Haig is the prime suspect. However, there is no conclusive evidence about the true identity of the person or persons called Deep Throat, assuming that such a phenomenon ever existed. As soon as Haig is named, we must become suspicious: the propaganda of the Bush networks has never been kind to Haig.

Haig and Bush, as leading clones of Henry Kissinger, were locked on a number of occasions into a kind of sibling rivalry, a rivalry which became especially acute during the first months of the Reagan Administration.

One of the major sub-plots of Watergate, and one that will eventually lead us back to the documented public record of George Bush, is the relation of the various activities of the Plumbers to the wiretapping of a group of prostitutes who operated out of a brothel in the Columbia Plaza Apartments, located in the immediate vicinity of the Watergate buildings. [fn 26]

Among the customers of the prostitutes there appear to have been a US Senator, an astronaut, A Saudi prince (the Embassy of Saudi Arabia is nearby), US and South Korean intelligence officials, and above all numerous Democratic Party leaders whose presence can be partially explained by the propinquity of the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate.

The Columbia Plaza Apartments brothel was under intense CIA surveillance by the Office of Security/Security Research Staff through one of their assets, an aging private detective out of the pages of Damon Runyon who went by the name of Louis James Russell. Russell was, according to Hougan, especially interested in bugging a hot line phone that linked the DNC with the nearby brothel. During the Watergate break-ins, James McCord's recruit to the Plumbers, Alfred C. Baldwin, would appear to have been bugging the telephones of the Columbia Plaza brothel.

Lou Russell, in the period between June 20 and July 2, 1973, was working for a detective agency that was helping George Bush prepare for an upcoming press conference. In this sense, Russell was working for Bush.

Russell is relevant because he seems (although he denied it) to have been the fabled sixth man of the Watergate break-in, the burglar who got away. He may also have been the burglar who tipped off the police, if indeed anyone did. Russell was a harlequin who had been the servant of many masters.

Lou Russell had once been the chief investigator for the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He had worked for the FBI. He had been a stringer for Jack Anderson, the columnist. In December, 1971 he had been an employee of General Security Services, the company that provided the guards who protected the Watergate buildings. In March of 1972 Russell had gone to work for James McCord and McCord Associates, whose client was the CREEP.

Later, after the scandal had broken, Russell worked for McCord's new and more successful firm, Security Associates. Russell had also worked directly for the CREEP as a night watchman. Russell had also worked for John Leon of Allied Investigators, Inc., a company that later went to work for George Bush and the Republican National Committee.

Still later, Russell found a job with the headquarters of the McGovern for President campaign. Russell's lawyer was Bud Fensterwald, and sometimes Russell performed investigative services for Fensterwald and for Fensterwald's Committee to Investigate Assassinations. In September, 1972, well after the scandal had become notorious, Russell seems to have joined with one Nick Beltrante in carrying out electronic countermeasures sweeps of the DNC headquarters, and during one of these he appears to have planted an electronic eavesdropping device in the phone of DNC worker Spencer Oliver which, when it was discovered, re-focussed public attention on the Watergate scandal at the end of the summer of 1972.

Russell was well acquainted with Carmine Bellino, the chief investigator on the staff of Sam Ervin's Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Practices.

Bellino was a Kennedy operative who had superintended the seamy side of the JFK White House, including such figures as Judith Exner, the president's alleged paramour. Later, Bellino would become the target of George Bush's most revealing public action during the Watergate period. Bellino's friend William Birely later provided Russell with an apartment in Silver Spring, Maryland, (thus allowing him to leave his room in a rooming house on Q Street in the District), a new car, and sums of money.

Russell had been a heavy drinker, and his social circle was that of the prostitutes, whom he sometimes patronized and sometimes served as a bouncer and goon. His familiarity with the brothel milieu facilitated his service for the Office of Security, which was to oversee the bugging and other surveillance of Columbia Plaza and other locations.

Lou Russell was incontestably one of the most fascinating figures of Watergate. How remarkable, then, that the indefatigable ferrets Woodward and Bernstein devoted so little attention to him, deeming him worthy of mention in neither of their two books. Woodward and met with Russell, but had ostensibly decided that there was "nothing to the story. Woodward claims to have seen nothing in Russell beyond the obvious "old drunk." [fn 27]

The FBI had questioned Russell after the DNC break-ins, probing his whereabouts on June 16-17 with the suspicion that he had indeed been one of the burglars. But this questioning led to nothing. Instead, Russell was contacted by Carmine Bellino, and later by Bellino's broker Birely, who set Russell up in the new apartment (or safe house) already mentioned, where one of the Columbia Plaza prostitutes moved in with him.

By 1973, minority Republican staffers at the Ervin committee began to realize the importance of Russell to a revisionist account of the scandal that might exonerate Nixon to some extent by shifting the burden of guilt elsewhere. On May 9, 1973, the Ervin committee accordingly subpoenaed Russell's telephone, job, and bank records. Two days later Russell replied to the committee that he had no job records or diaries, had no bank account, made long-distance calls only to his daughter, and could do nothing for the committee.

On May 16-17, 1973, Deep Throat warned Woodward that "everybody's life is in danger." On May 18, while the staff of the Ervin committee were pondering their next move vis-avis Russell, Russell suffered a massive heart attack. This was the same day that McCord, advised by his lawyer and Russell's, Fensterwald, began his public testimony to the Ervin committee on the coverup. Russell was taken to Washington Adventist Hospital, where he recovered to some degree and convalesced until June 20.{Solstice point} Russell was convinced that he had been the victim of an attempted assassination. He told his daughter after leaving the hospital that he believed that he had been poisoned, that someone had entered his apartment (the Bellino-Birely safe house in Silver Spring) and "switched pills on me." [fn 28]

Leaving the hospital on June 20, Russell was still very weak and pale. But now, although he remained on the payroll of James McCord, he also accepted a retainer from his friend John Leon, who had been engaged by the Republicans to carry out a counterinvestigation of the Watergate affair.

Leon was in contact with Jerris Leonard, a lawyer associated with Nixon, the GOP, the Republican National Committee, and with Chairman George Bush. Leonard was a former assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Nixon administration. Leonard had stepped down as head of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) on March 17, 1973.

In June, 1973 Leonard was special counsel to George Bush personally, hired by Bush and not by the RNC. Leonard says today that his job consisted in helping to keep the Republican Party separate from Watergate, deflecting Watergate from the party "so it would not be a party thing."

[fn 29] As Hougan tells it, "Leon was convinced that Watergate was a set-up, that prostitution was at the heart of the affair, and that the Watergate arrests had taken place following a tip-off to the police; in other words, the June 17 burglary had been sabotaged from within, Leon believed, and he intended to prove it." [fn 30] "Integral to Leon's theory of the affair was Russell's relationship to the Ervin committee's chief investigator, Carmine Bellino, and the circumstances surrounding Russell's relocation to Silver Spring in the immediate aftermath of the Watergate arrests. In an investigative memorandum submitted to GOP lawyer Jerris Leonard, Leon described what he hoped to prove: that Russell, reporting to Bellino, had been a spy for the Democrats within the CRP, and that Russell had tipped off Bellino (and the police) to the June 17 break-in. The man who knew most about this was, of course, Leon's new employee, Lou Russell."

Is it possible that Jerris Leonard communicated the contents of Leon's memorandum to the RNC and to its Chairman George Bush during the days after he received it? It is possible. But for Russell, the game was over: on July 2, 1973, barely two weeks after his release from the hospital, Russell suffered a second heart attack, which killed him. He was buried with quite suspicious haste the following day. The potential witness with perhaps the largest number of personal ties to Watergate protagonists, and the witness who might have re-directed the scandal, not just towards Bellino, but toward the prime movers behind and above McCord and Hunt and Paisley, had perished in a way that recalls the fate of so many knowledgeable Iran-contra figures.

With Russell silenced forever, Leon appears to have turned his attention to targeting Bellino, perhaps with a view to forcing him to submit to depositioning or other questioning in which questions about his relationship to Russell might be asked. Leon, who had been convicted in 1964 of wiretapping in a case involving El Paso Gas Co. and Tennesse Gas Co., had weapons in his own possession that could be used against Bellino. During the time that Russell was still in the hospital, on June 8, Leon had signed an affidavit for Jerris Leonard in which he stated that he had been hired by Democratic operative Bellino during the 1960 presidential campaign to "infiltrate the operations" of Albert B. "Ab" Hermann, a staff member of the Republican National Committee. Leon asserted in the affidavit that although he had not been able to infiltrate Hermann's office, he observed the office with field glasses and employed "an electronic device known as 'the big ear' aimed at Mr. Hermann's window." Leon recounted that he had been assisted by former CIA officer John Frank, Oliver W. Angelone gain access to the two top floors of the Wardman Park Hotel (now the Sheraton Park) just before they were occupied by Nixon on the evening of the Nixon-Kennedy television debate.

Edward Murray Jones, then living in the Philippines, said in his affidavit that he had been assigned by Bellino to tail individuals at Washington National Airport and in downtown Washington. [fn 31] According to Hougan, "these sensational allegations were provided by Leon to Republican attorneys on July 10, 1973, exactly a week after Russell's funeral. Immediately, attorney Jerris Leonard conferred with RNC Chairman George Bush.

It appeared to both men that a way had been found to place the Watergate affair in a new perspective, and, perhaps, to turn the tide. A statement was prepared and a press conference scheduled at which Leon was to be the star witness, or speaker. Before the press conference could be held, however, Leon suffered a heart attack on July 13, 1973, and died the same day."[fn 32 ]

[Two important witnesses, each of whom represented a threat to reopen the most basic questions of Watergate, dead in little more than a week!

Bush is likely to have known of the import of Russell's testimony, and he is proven to have known of the content of Leon's. Jerris Leonard later told Hougan that the death of John Leon "came as a complete shock.

It was...well, to be honest with you, it was frightening. It was only a week after Russell's death, or something like that, and it happened on the very eve of the press conference. We didn't know what was going on. We were scared." { :0 }[fn 33] Hougan comments: "With the principal witness against Bellino no longer available, and with Russell dead as well, Nixon's last hope of diverting attention from Watergate--slim from the beginning--was laid to rest forever."

But George Bush went ahead with the press conference that had been announced, even if John Leon, the principal speaker, was now dead.

According to Nixon, Bush had been "privately pleading for some action that would get us off the defensive" since back in the springtime. [fn 34] On July 24, 1973, Bush made public the affidavits by Leon, Jones, and Shimon which charged that the Ervin committee chief investigator Carmine Bellino had recruited spies to help defeat Nixon back in 1960. "I cannot and do not vouch for the veracity of the statements contained in the affidavits," said Bush, "but I do believe that this matter is serious enough to concern the Senate Watergate committee, and particularly since its chief investigator is the subject of the charges contained in the affidavits. If these charges are true, a taint would most certainly be attached to some of the committee's work." Bush's statement to the press prediscounted Democratic charges that his revelations were part of a Nixon Administration counter-offensive to deflect Watergate.

Bush specified that on the basis of the Shimon and Leon affidavits, he was "confident" that Jones and <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/angelic005.gif" alt="Angel" title="" />one "had bugged the Nixon space or tapped his phones prior to the television debate." He conceded that "there was corruption" in the ranks of the GOP. "But now I have presented some serious allegations that if true could well have affected the outcome of the 1960 presidential race.

The Nixon- Kennedy election was a real cliff-hanger, and the debates bore heavily on the outcome of the people's decision." Bush rejected any charge that he was releasing the affidavits in a bid to "justify Watergate." He asserted that he was acting in the interest of "fair play."

Bush said that he had taken the affidavits to Sen. Sam Ervin, the chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee, and to GOP Sen. Howard Baker, that committee's ranking Republican, but that the committee had failed to act so far. "I haven't seen much action on it," Bush added. When the accuracy of the affidavits was challenged, Bush replied, "We've heard a lot more hearsay bandied about the [Watergate] committee than is presented here. I'd like to know how serious it is. I'd like to see it looked into," said Bush. He called on Sam Ervin and his committee to probe all the charges forthwith. Bush was "convinced that there is in fact substance to the allegations."

In 1991, the Bush damage control line is that events relating to the 1980 "October surprise" deal of the Reagan-Bush campaign with the Iranian Khomeini mullahs of Iran to block the freeing of the US hostages are so remote in the past that nobody is interested in them any more. But in 1973, Bush thought that events of 1960 were highly relevant to Watergate.

Bellino labeled Bush's charges "absolutely false." "I categorically and unequivocally deny that I have ever ordered, requested, directed, or participated in any electronic surveillance whatsoever in connection with any political campaign," said Bellino. "By attacking me on the basis of such false and malicious lies, Mr. Bush has attempted to distract me from carrying out what I consider one of the most important assignments of my life. I shall continue to exert all my efforts to ascertain the facts and the truth pertinent to this investigation."

Here Bush was operating on several levels of reality at once. The implications of the Russell-Leon interstices would be suspected only in retrospect. What appeared on the surface was a loyal Republican mounting a diversionary attack in succor of his embattled president. At deeper levels, the reality might be the reverse, the stiffing of Nixon in order to defend the forces behind the break-in and the scandal.

Back in April, as the Ervin committee was preparing to go into action against the White House, Bush had participated in the argument about whether the committee sessions should be televised or not. Bush discussed this issue with Senators Baker and Brock, both Republicans who wanted the hearings to be televised- in Baker's case, so that he could be on television himself as the ranking Republican on the panel.

Ehrlichmann, to whom Bush reported in the White House, mindful of the obvious potential damage to the administration, wanted the hearings not televised, not even public, but in executive session with a sanitized transcript handed out later. {SHADES OF THIS BUSH ADMIN!}

So Bush, having no firm convictions of his own, but always looking for his own advantage, told Ehrlichman he sympathized with both sides of the argument, and was "sitting happily on the middle of the fence with a picket sticking up my you know what. I'll see you." [fn 35] But Nixon's damage control interest had been sacrificed by Bush's vacillating advocacy, and the devastating testimony of figures like Dean and McCord would have its maximum impact.

Bush had talked in public about the Ervin committee during a visit to Seattle on June 29 in response to speculation that Nixon might be called to testify.

Bush argued that the presidency would be diminished if Nixon were to appear. Bush was adamant that Nixon could not be subpoenaed and that he should not testify voluntarily. Shortly thereafter Bush had demanded that the Ervin committee wrap up its proceedings to "end the speculation" about Nixon's role in the coverup. "Let's get all the facts out, let's get the whole thing over with, get all the people up there before the Watergate committee. I don't believe John Dean's testimony." [fn 36]

Senator Sam Ervin placed Bush's intervention against Carmine Bellino in the context of other diversionary efforts launched by the RNC. Ervin, along with Democratic Senators Talmadge and Inouye were targetted by a campaign inspired by Bush's RNC which alleged that they had tried to prevent a full probe of LBJ intimate Bobby Baker back in 1963. Later, speaking on the Senate floor on October 9, 1973, Ervin commented: One can but admire the zeal exhibited by the Republican National Committee and its journalistic allies in their desperate effort to invent a red herring to drag across the trail which leads to the truth concerning Watergate." [fn 37]

But Ervin saw Bush's Bellino material as a more serious assault. "Bush's charge distressed me very much for two reasons. First, I deemed it unjust to Bellino, who denied it and whom I had known for many years to be an honorable man and a faithful public servant; and, second, it was out of character with the high opinion I entertained of Bush. Copies of the affidavits had been privately submitted to me before the news conference, and I had expressed my opinion that there was not a scintilla of competent or credible evidence in them to sustain the charges against Bellino." [fn 38]

Sam Dash, the chief counsel to the Ervin committee, had a darker and more detailed view of Bush's actions. Dash later recounted: "In the midst of the pressure to complete a shortened witness list by the beginning of August, a nasty incident occurred that was clearly meant to sidetrack the committee and destroy or immobilize one of my most valuable staff assistants--Carmine Bellino, my chief investigator.

On July 24, 1973, the day after the committee subpoena for the White House tapes was served on the President, the Republican national chairman, George Bush, called a press conference...." "Three days later, as if carefully orchestrated, twenty-two Republican senators signed a letter to Senator Ervin, urging the Senate Watergate Committee to investigate Bush's charges and calling for Bellino's suspension pending the outcome of the investigation.

Ervin was forced into a corner, and on August 3 he appointed a subcommittee consisting of Senators Talmadge, Inouye, and Gurney to investigate the charges. The White House knew that Carmine Bellino, a wizard at reconstructing the receipts and expenditures of funds despite laundering techniques and the destruction of records, was hot on the trail of Herbert Kalmbach and Bebe Rebozo.

Bellino's diligent, meticulous work would ultimately disclose Kalmbach's funding scheme for the White House's dirty tricks campaign and unravel a substantial segment of Rebozo's secret cash transactions on behalf of Nixon." [fn 39] Dash writes that Bellino was devastated by Bush's attacks, "rendered emotionally unable to work because of the charges." The mechanism targeted by Bellino is of course relevant to Bill Liedtke's funding of the CREEP described above. Perhaps Bush was in fact seeking to shut down Bellino solely to defend only himself and his confederates.{YES, I agree}

Members of Dash's staff soon realized that there had been another participant in the process of assembling the material that Bush had presented. According to Dash, "the charges became even murkier when our staff discovered that the person who had put them together was a man named Jack Buckley.

In their dirty tricks investigation of the 1972 presidential campaign, Terry Lenzner and his staff had identified Buckley as the Republican spy, known as Fat Jack, who had intercepted and photographed Muskie's mail between his campaign and Senate offices as part of Ruby I (a project code named in Liddy's Gemstone political espionage plan)." It would appear that Fat Jack Buckley was now working for George Bush. Ervin then found that Senators Gurney and Baker, both Republicans, might be willing to listen to additional charges made by Buckley against Bellino. Dash says he "smelled the ugly odor of blackmail on the part of somebody and I did not like it."

Later Senators Talmadge and Inouye filed a report completely exonerating Bellino, while Gurney conceded that there was no direct evidence against Bellino, but that there was some conflicting testimony that ought to be noted. Dash sums up that in late November, 1973, "the matter ended with little fanfare and almost no newspaper comment. The reputation of a public official with many years' service as a dedicated and incorruptible investigator had been deeply wounded and tarnished, and Bellino would retire from federal service believi

At left, President Richard Nixon is shown in the Oval Office in Oct. 13, 1973; at right, Eugenio R. Martinez, a CIA mole involved in the Watergate break-in. (AP)EXCLUSIVE: An internal history of the Watergate scandal prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency – intended to help the Agency make a clean breast of its own wrongdoing and kept in classified vaults for more than four decades – reveals how the spy service used a double agent to keep tabs on the burglars whose arrests ultimately led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon, and withheld information about the agent from federal prosecutors.
Entitled “Working Draft – CIA Watergate History,” the 155-page study was largely written by John C. Richards, a CIA officer who died in December 1974, and was brought nearly to completion by unnamed Agency colleagues who built on Richards’ typed draft and handwritten annotations.
Earlier this year, a federal judge ordered the government to turn the document over to Judicial Watch, the conservative legal watchdog, which had sued for access under the Freedom of Information Act. The group finally received the declassified report in July and shared it with Fox News.
Even in draft form, the document represents CIA’s fullest narrative treatment of the Watergate affair, which first surfaced publicly in the predawn hours of June 17, 1972. That’s when Washington police, dressed in plain clothes and responding to a call from a private security guard, arrested at gunpoint five burglars inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington.
The arrested men were wearing business suits and rubber gloves and carrying electronic eavesdropping devices. Investigation swiftly revealed that one of them was employed by the president's re-election campaign committee, and that four of the five boasted past ties to CIA. But one of the arrested men, it turns out, was still on Langley's payroll at the time of the arrests, and had been feeding information about the break-in team to his CIA case officers the entire time.
That CIA mole was Eugenio R. Martinez, a Cuban Bay of Pigs veteran who was recruited to the break-in team by E. Howard Hunt, the legendary former CIA officer and spy novelist who had helped plan the Bay of Pigs operation in the Kennedy era and had gone on to work as a consultant on covert projects at the Nixon White House. Along with re-election committee lawyer G. Gordon Liddy, a former FBI agent, Hunt masterminded the doomed break-in and surveillance operation at the DNC; he and Liddy would be indicted along with the five arrested men and both would serve lengthy sentences in federal prison.
While Watergate scholars have previously reported that Martinez was a CIA informant during the time he was working for Hunt and Liddy – the wiry operative known as "Musculito" provided Langley with a steady stream of information about the Cuban exile community in Miami, from where he and three of the other burglars hailed, for $100 a month (about $575 today) – the newly declassified CIA document fleshes out the relationship in greater detail and shows how highly the Agency prized it.
In October 1973 – by which point the months-long effort of the Nixon White House to cover up the origins of the DNC break-in had collapsed, and President Nixon was struggling in vain to stave off impeachment – attorneys from the Watergate Special Prosecution Force met with the CIA’s top lawyer and sought access to documents concerning Martinez. In particular, the draft report states, the WSPF lawyers wanted to review a previous report prepared by one of Martinez’s case officers in Miami and a copy of Martinez’s “roundup of his discussions with Hunt” from April 1972, the month before the burglars first penetrated the DNC suite.
CIA General Counsel John S. Warner adamantly refused. “Warner stated that under no circumstances would the Agency give up all records relating to the Agency’s relationship with Martinez,” the report stated. “Warner explained why such a request was difficult for the Agency – the breaching of trust of an agent.”
The document marks the first known reference by CIA to Martinez as “an agent,” as opposed to an informant, and exposes how valuable an asset the Agency considered him to be. Among several-dozen passages of the report still redacted today, more than four decades after the events in question, are the names of two CIA case officers to whom Martinez reported.
Elsewhere the report chronicles how top CIA officials, including then-Director Richard Helms, withheld data about Martinez from the FBI at the very outset of its investigation of the break-in.
On June 19, 1972, the first business day after the burglars were arrested, the report notes that Helms received a briefing from CIA’s Director of Security at the time, Howard Osborn, who provided “biographic details” for each of the arrested men. Yet three days later, the report states, Helms told the Bureau's acting director, L. Patrick Gray III, that “none [of the arrested men] had worked for the Agency in the past two years.” That was untrue where Martinez was concerned.
"This CIA Watergate report is an extraordinary historical document," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton in a statement to Fox News. "Given that it disclosed direct CIA involvement in Watergate, it is no surprise it took forty-two years and a Judicial Watch lawsuit to force its release."
Now 94 and believed to be living in Miami, Martinez has granted virtually no interviews. He has long fascinated Watergate scholars, both because of his dual role on the break-in team and because the FBI determined that a key that Martinez was carrying at the time of the arrests -- and struggled unsuccessfully to conceal from the police -- fit the desk of DNC secretary Ida “Maxie” Wells, whose telephone was the only one wiretapped in the ill-fated operation. No other burglar had such a key and it has never been satisfactorily explained as to how or why Martinez came into possession of it.
Jim Hougan, author of Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA, a landmark study of the break-in published by Random House in 1984, called the declassified draft “an artifact in its own right” but said it carries “a musty fragrance, brought on by having been squirreled away for so long that its narrative has begun to rot.”
Hougan pointed to numerous aspects of Watergate – all of which involved CIA – that are unmentioned in the Agency’s ostensibly comprehensive mea culpa. These omissions include, among other things, the destruction of Watergate-related documents shortly after the arrests by a CIA officer named Lee Pennington and the activities of Robert F. Bennett, later a U.S. senator from Utah, who as a CIA asset in the early 1970s sent his superiors a memorandum – first published in Hougan’s book – boasting of how he had been feeding Bob Woodward of the Washington Post story leads that led him and the newspaper away from Agency involvement in Watergate. For this, Bennett said in the 1973 memorandum, the reporter was “suitably grateful for the fine stories and by-lines which he gets.”
One area where the CIA draft report appears willfully to have steered clear of further implicating the Agency was in its reference to a CIA officer named Rob Roy Ratliff, the Agency’s liaison on the National Security Council.
In a 1974 affidavit filed with the House Judiciary Committee when it was weighing articles of impeachment against President Nixon, Ratliff swore that E. Howard Hunt, while ostensibly retired from CIA and working as a consultant in the Nixon White House, was using secure Agency couriers to send sealed pouches to CIA Director Helms on a regular basis, continuing right up until shortly before the Watergate arrests.
Sources familiar with the matter said the pouches contained “gossip” of a sexually graphic nature about White House officials that could be used for the purpose of constructing psychological profiles of them – a violation of the Agency’s charter. Hunt had already played a lead role in getting CIA prepare such a profile of Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times.
The draft report mentions Ratliff by name and notes the existence of his affidavit – but otherwise makes no mention of its explosive contents, which suggested that Hunt had never really retired from CIA and was spying on the Nixon White House for Langley at a level even higher than Martinez.